1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a semiconductor device and a method of manufacturing the same, and in particular to a semiconductor device having a silicide layer and a method of manufacturing the same.
2. Related Art
In semiconductor elements, such as MOS transistors, composing semiconductor integrated circuits silicide layers are formed over the source/drain impurity-diffused layers and over the gate electrodes, in order to lower the contact resistance. Titanium silicide, cobalt silicide, nickel silicide and so forth are adoptable to the silicide layers. In particular in recent years, Pt-doped nickel silicide has been used in view of improving the heat resistance.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2007-067225 may be exemplified as a publicly-known literature disclosing a method of manufacturing a semiconductor device. Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2007-067225 discloses a technique of forming Er-doped nickel silicide.
As described in the above, the conventional semiconductor devices have been suffering from increase in the junction leakage and resistivity, as a result of thinning of the silicide layers.